


Transitions

by Josselin



Series: Laurent Is a Girl [4]
Category: Captive Prince - C. S. Pacat
Genre: Adolescent Sexuality, Child Abuse, Childhood Sexual Abuse, Deception, F/M, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Incest, Laurent is a girl, Manipulation, Mental Health Issues, Past Child Abuse, Past Sexual Abuse, Sexual Abuse, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-27
Updated: 2018-12-27
Packaged: 2019-09-28 12:39:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17183165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Josselin/pseuds/Josselin
Summary: When Laurent was fourteen, she spent two days in foster care. Her brother argued later that it was really just one evening, one night, and one morning, but she insisted it was two days, because it sounded better when she was trying to guilt trip him. That was how long it took for the police or the FBI or child services or whatever to contact her brother in France and for him to get a flight back to take custody of her.





	Transitions

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Seek_The_Mist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Seek_The_Mist/gifts).



> This one is darker in tone than some of the other sequels, just as a warning! The POV might be a bit unsettling. Feel free to ask me if you have specific questions.

When Laurent was fourteen, she spent two days in foster care. Her brother argued later that it was really just one evening, one night, and one morning, but she insisted it was two days, because it sounded better when she was trying to guilt trip him. That was how long it took for the police or the FBI or child services or whatever to contact her brother in France and for him to get a flight back to take custody of her.

There was some discussion, on the second day (or the first morning, if you listened to Auguste, whatever), that her uncle was going to actually get bail and be able to take custody of her again before her brother arrived. Apparently her uncle wasn’t a flight risk with all of his assets seized by the FBI. Laurent felt a little bit pale when the child services officer told her this, and she thought to herself with dismay that she was going to have to tell them. She tried some tears, first, about how she didn’t want to see her uncle and she just wanted her brother, and they were sympathetic, but she wasn’t sure it was going to work. Then, she went to the bathroom to make sure that the video was still on her phone. The police had taken all of the computers at their house and her uncle’s phone, but they hadn’t taken her phone from her pocket where she’d been crying in the corner. 

The video was encrypted anyway. She didn’t think they would know what it was even if they did take her phone. All of those television programs where there were super smart hackers who worked for the police were just fake. The police didn’t care about that stuff.

Laurent had picked out who she was going to confess to. They would probably expect her to confide in the child services woman, but Laurent didn’t like her, and she felt like her talents played better with men, anyway, so she had her eye on a middle-aged FBI agent who she felt confident would be properly horrified by her tearful confession and wouldn’t send her back to her uncle. 

But then Auguste arrived, so Plan A had been a success after all, and Laurent threw herself into her brother’s embrace, cried some more for good measure, and whimpered, “Don’t go back to France,” into his shirt.

Auguste seemed mostly perplexed by her uncle’s crime. “But was he in debt?” he asked the FBI agent--the nice one Laurent had been eyeing.

“We’re still looking at his financials.”

“Has he spent Laurent’s trust? He wasn’t supposed to have access to that.”

“It doesn’t seem so,” the agent agreed.

“I just don’t understand why he would do it,” said Auguste. “He has plenty of money, I thought. Does he gamble or something?”

“That much money,” the FBI agent said. “It can lure people to do things they wouldn’t otherwise.”

Auguste still seemed skeptical, so Laurent started crying again, and asked Auguste if they could leave.

She’d been allowed to pack a backpack of her school things and a suitcase of her clothes when child services had taken her to the foster house, and they weren’t allowed back to uncle’s house yet, so that was all Laurent had when Auguste took her to his apartment in the city.

Once at his apartment, Laurent set her backpack down on the floor and sat on the couch. Auguste proceeded to kind of ignore her and start doing work on his laptop. That was ridiculous; it was a Saturday.

Laurent sat for a while. First she felt victorious--this was what she had wanted--and then she felt bored. Then she started to feel disappointed. She got up after a while and wandered around Auguste’s living room, touching stuff. She looked at the books on his shelves. She suspected that they weren’t his. Maybe he had hired some kind of designer to decorate his apartment and the decorator had picked the books based on the color of their covers matching the decor. The idea of Auguste reading a crime thriller and a tome on philosophy and then deciding to shelve them next to each other was kind of laughable. 

She messed a bit with his television, and he only glanced up when she managed to turn it on, and then he looked back at his computer, and she scanned over various channels for a few minutes before she got bored of that and turned it off. 

She started to feel hungry. The foster house had given her a bowl of cereal for breakfast, but now it was close to 3pm. She wandered from Auguste’s living room to his kitchen.

His refrigerator contained a bottle of ketchup and a bottle of soy sauce, a container of tonic water, a package of cheese slices that Laurent wasn’t sure were actually supposed to be the color that they were, and half of a bottle of white wine. 

She went through the cabinets. One of them was stocked with cooking implements that looked like they had never been used. Maybe they came from the same designer who had bought the books, she thought. There were four cabinets that were completely empty. Another had six place settings that all matched, as though Auguste were going to host a dinner party. 

The only cabinet that she believed Auguste had anything to do with personally turned out to be a wine rack. That was full.

She went and sat down next to where Auguste was working at the kitchen table. “Auguste.”

“Laurent, I’m busy,” he said. He’d been busy for the last few months every time she’d tried to call him, which was part of the problem.

Laurent sighed heavily. She waited a few seconds and the she did it again. 

Finally, Auguste said, “What?”

“Are you going to feed me or not?”

Auguste actually looked over from his computer. “Can’t you--feed yourself?”

“I could if you had any food,” said Laurent. She was not going to eat the questionable cheese.

Auguste glanced over at the kitchen, seemingly vaguely puzzled. He’d probably told his designer to stock the kitchen with food and was wondering why it hadn’t happened. “I guess we could--go to the store?”

“Good idea,” said Laurent, as though Auguste were an actual adult and not obviously incompetent. She stood up.

“Now?” Auguste said, glancing back at his computer.

“I’m hungry,” she said. 

It was her brother’s turn to sigh heavily, and he closed his laptop, and grabbed his keys.

They went to a big box store, where Auguste pushed a cart impatiently and Laurent filled it with food. It seemed questionable that she would be able to get Auguste to go to the store regularly, she figured. They should have groceries delivered, like at her uncle’s house. But in the meantime, she stocked up on stuff for his cupboards. A bunch of cans of soup, and then, wondering, a can opener. Some boxes of cereal. Frozen meals. 

By the time they made it through the frozen aisle, Auguste looked antsy. “Are you done?”

“No,” said Laurent. And she walked through the pharmacy aisles, buying shampoo and conditioner and soap for her face and tampons.

She looked over the cart. “Do you need any other stuff?” she said.

“No.”

“What about for me? Where am I going to sleep?”

This also seemed to be a question that Auguste hadn’t necessarily considered. 

“Do you have towels for me? Bedding?”

Auguste admitted he wasn’t sure, and they continued to another part of the store where Laurent bought pink towels and pink sheets and a pink blanket. 

“That’s very pink,” said Auguste critically.

“I’m traumatized by being in foster care,” said Laurent. “Don’t make this transitional period harder for me.” That had been what the child services officer had told Auguste to be aware of. Transitional periods were apparently very hard.

Auguste himself looked vaguely traumatized, but they wheeled the cart over to the check out.

Auguste picked up food from a Thai restaurant on their way home, so they ate that and Laurent put away all of her other purchases. She threw out the questionable cheese. Auguste went back to his computer and Laurent investigated the rest of the apartment. She had never been there. Auguste had always come to their parents’ house, for holidays or get-togethers, and then after their father died, to uncle’s. 

She found Auguste’s bedroom, and eyed it curiously, and then the master bathroom, which was nice. There were four other doorways, which turned out to be a closet full of towels--nicer than the pink ones she had picked out, Laurent might take some--, a workout room full of weights and complicated machines, another bathroom, much smaller than the first with just a shower, and a second bedroom. 

It was a smallish room, with an empty closet, a twin bed, and a strange-looking nightstand that was probably fashionable in some way with a lamp on top of it. 

The bed was made with a strange blanket that wasn’t soft at all. Laurent took that off and put it in the closet, and instead put her pink sheets and pink blanket on the guest bed. Making beds reminded her of when she had helped her mother make beds as a little girl, shaking the sheets a little to get them to spread properly over the bed. Laurent would hide under the sheets, sometimes, and her mother would pretend to spread them on top of her. “Oh no, a lump!” and tickle her through the sheets. She missed her mother intensely all of sudden and blinked back tears.

She put some towels from Auguste’s linen closet into the small bathroom on the rack, and put her shampoo and conditioner and soap in there.

Then she took her suitcase from where she had left it by the door and put it in the closet of the smaller bedroom. She opened it up and hung her clothes in the closet and left the suitcase neatly sitting on the floor. 

She felt lonely. 

She had expected that Auguste would have to take care of her, if her uncle went to jail, and she had sort of expected Auguste to be a bit helpless about it, but she thought he might try harder than he seemed to be trying.

She missed her mother again. Her mother had been dead for four years, and sometimes Laurent missed her so much she thought she might die. She had missed Auguste a lot, when she’d been six and he’d gone away to college, but he hadn’t been dead, so it wasn’t quite the same. And then her father had died, also, and she missed him, but in a vague and more distant way. She felt bad sometimes that thinking of her father’s death usually made her miss her mother more. Shouldn’t she miss him an equal amount? But she didn’t. 

She didn’t want to be alone in this room anymore. She went back out to where Auguste was sitting at the table and sat down next to him. 

She sighed heavily again for a few minutes, until he looked at her, exasperated, and then she turned watery eyes on him and said, “Auguste, I’m sad.”

Auguste’s face made a complicated expression. 

“Maybe you should talk to a psychologist.”

“I’m not crazy,” Laurent objected. “I’m just sad!”

There was a moment of silence. “I don’t know what to do about that,” Auguste said.

Laurent was tempted to roll her eyes. He didn’t understand anything. Laurent took his hand and held it. Auguste looked uncomfortable. “Sometimes I miss Mom,” Laurent said.

Auguste’s face cleared a little. “Me too,” he agreed. 

Laurent kept hold of Auguste’s hand for a few minutes, watching her brother look increasingly uncomfortable, and then she let him go and took out some of her homework to do at the kitchen table while he kept working. It was Saturday night, so doing homework seemed ridiculous, but she had nothing else to do and she didn’t want to be by herself.

Sunday was much the same. Monday morning, Laurent got up and got ready for school, and then searched for her brother and found him working out in the gym room. She sat on an exercise ball and watched him lift for a while. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and it was interesting to watch the muscles move as he worked.

Eventually, she said, “How I am going to get to school?”

Auguste acted like he hadn’t thought about that, either, and then he said he’d drive her, and once he was ready for work and they were in the car he didn’t even know where her school was.

Tuesday, he picked her up from school, and instead of taking her back to his apartment, he parked at a psychologist’s office.

Laurent frowned at him from the passenger seat, feeling deeply betrayed. “No,” she said.

“Transitional periods are hard for teenagers,” said Auguste. It was like he’d already been talking to the psychologist. 

She’d been through this drill before. Her father had tried it when her mother died, and her uncle when her father died. No one had helped her then. The stupid psychologist couldn’t bring her mother back, or make her brother pay attention to her, or stop her uncle from--anyway, psychologists were useless.

“No,” Laurent said again. “I’m not going in there.”

Auguste unbuckled his seat belt. “You’re going in,” he said.

He half-dragged her into the office, and then he looked like he was going to try to escape himself, so she said, “The moment you turn your back, I’m leaving,” so he had to stay, too, sitting next to her uncomfortably in the waiting room. There was some kind of dumb painting of flowers on the wall in the waiting room. It was probably supposed to be soothing. If Laurent squinted at it, she thought maybe it looked like an evil clown. She thought about telling the psychologist that.

They were ushered into the psychologist’s office, who was some middle-aged lady with glasses. Laurent didn’t tell the psychologist anything. She sat there, staring at the wall, sullenly, and let Auguste awkwardly explain her circumstances. 

The psychologist took a lot of notes about her life story. Mother died of cancer, lots of notes on her yellow pad. Father died in car accident, more notes on the yellow pad. Uncle arrested, more notes. 

“How do you feel about all of this, Laurent?” the psychologist asked.

Laurent stared and didn’t say anything.

Auguste cleared his throat. “Over the weekend, Laurent told me she felt sad.”

More notes on the yellow pad. “Sad?” the psychologist said. Laurent turned her glare on her brother, feeling even more betrayed. “And how do you act, when you feel sad?”

Laurent refused to engage with this nonsense. 

She left as soon as the hour was up, and waited next to Auguste’s car for her brother to catch up. 

A few nights later, her brother drank two glasses of wine while they ate really disgusting Chinese takeout. Then, he spread his hands flat on the kitchen table. “Laurent.”

That was his serious tone. She looked up from where she was using a chopstick to push greasy pieces of food around her plate. 

“I talked to our uncle today.”

Her eyes widened. She felt betrayed. “I thought he was in jail!”

“He’s out on bail, Laurent,” Auguste said. 

That was a horrifying thought. She hadn’t thought she would ever have to see him again. How could they just--let people out of jail? “What if he--does it again?”

“I don’t think anyone is going to give him the opportunity to embezzle millions again,” said Auguste.

Laurent frowned. She looked at her plate.

“The reason I talked to him,” said Auguste, “is about you.”

Laurent looked up at him.

“I think you should go back to living with him,” said Auguste.

Laurent was horrified. “Auguste, no!”

“It will be much easier,” Auguste said. “He has the whole house, and all of your stuff is there, and he’s much better at--feeding you, and his driver can take you to school--”

“Don’t make me go back there!” Laurent could feel her eyes filling with tears and she wasn’t even doing it deliberately.

“I have to go back to France for work,” said Auguste. “You can’t just be here alone.”

“I can!” said Laurent. “I’ll be good! I’ll be fine.”

“It’s not even legal to leave a fourteen-year-old unsupervised,” said Auguste. 

“I’m almost fifteen.” There were tears on both of Laurent’s cheeks now, and she could see through her blurry tears that Auguste was crying too.

“I’m just not cut out for this, Laurent,” Auguste said. “I love you but I’m a horrible guardian; I’m not the right person to take care of you--”

“He touched me!” said Laurent, blurting it out.

“What?”

Laurent blinked furiously. “So you can’t send me back there.”

Auguste was quiet. He wiped at his face with the back of his hand. “What do you mean, he touched you.”

Laurent was back to wishing she had seen another way out of this. “What you think I mean.”

“You mean,” said Auguste. “Sexually?”

Laurent nodded. 

That was--an understatement, but it should be enough, right? He couldn’t make her go back there now. She shouldn’t even have to show him the video--

“What did he do?” Auguste’s voice was terrible.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” said Laurent. “Don’t make me go back there.”

Auguste was crying again. “Oh my god,” he kept saying, over and over. 

That was the end of the discussion of Laurent returning to live with her uncle, fortunately. As far as Laurent could tell, it was the end of Auguste’s involvement with their uncle at all, which was fine with Laurent. And aside from occasionally looking at her with a stricken expression, it was also the end of their conversation of what, exactly, their uncle had done. 

It was not the end of the psychologist. The following Tuesday, Auguste pulled up in front of her office. 

Laurent looked over at him.

“Don’t even argue with me, Laurent,” Auguste said. 

“Did you tell her?” said Laurent.

“You should tell her,” said Auguste.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” said Laurent.

“Fine. Talk about something else. Tell her about how I managed to set off the smoke alarm making toast.”

“If I tell her you almost electrocuted yourself putting a fork in the toaster she’s going to take me away and send me back to foster care!”

“Stare at the wall, then,” said Auguste. “You’re going in there.”

Laurent realized that, in her head, once she lived with Auguste, it was going to be like when she was little again. It seemed stupid, thinking that explicitly, but she had thought that she and Auguste would eat together, and that he’d talk to her when she got home from school like their parents had, and that they’d do things on weekends like her family had used to. 

It wasn’t like that. Even her uncle had paid far more attention to her and talked to her more than Auguste did. 

Auguste was there, but he wasn’t really there. Laurent launched a plan to get Auguste to pay more attention to her. 

Phase one of the plan involved having a lot of needs. They were out of food and needed to go to the store (they weren’t, but Auguste didn’t check the cupboards). Laurent didn’t suggest that their uncle had a service that had groceries delivered. Food was convenient because even if they had some, something she wanted could be spoiled. The milk was off. Her frozen waffles were expired. The ice cream was covered with gross ice crystals.

Auguste was so distant as she loaded up carts of food, that she graduated to more expensive needs. She wanted to do homework in her room and she needed a desk. That was good for at least an hour of wandering around a furniture store. Spring was starting to be warmer and all her spring things were still at her uncle’s, so she needed new clothes. 

After a certain number of purchases, Auguste did start to become dubious. She could only need food or clothes so many times. She tried to use things that he wouldn’t verify. “My underwear is worn out,” she said, and he took her to the store but refused to even go into the women’s underwear area with her and stood like fifty feet away, texting her every few minutes if she was done yet. 

Auguste eventually realized that it was easier to give her access to his amazon account and tell her to have things delivered than it was to take her to the store, so Laurent had to begin phase two of getting his attention, which involved buying progressively more expensive things until he’d object. 

She tried reasonable things, first. A jacket. A clock for her nightstand in her bedroom. The packages arrived in the apartment’s package room and Auguste handed them to her without even asking what they were. 

She watched an ancient episode of Sex and the City on TV one night, bored, and they were all talking about rabbit vibrators, so Laurent took inspiration from that and ordered one of those from her brother’s amazon account, but he ignored that as thoroughly as he had her other purchases. She decided to go even bigger, and ordered a laptop computer.

She had a whole justification planned, for when she expected to be called to account, that it was a birthday gift to herself, because Auguste had completely forgotten her birthday and by the time he picked her up that day from work it was so late that the bakery would be closed and she couldn’t even have one of her favorite cupcakes. 

But Auguste didn’t comment on the arrival of the box, the line item on his credit card, or the new appearance of a laptop in Laurent’s room. A few days later, Laurent decided she was still mad he’d forgotten her birthday, and made a fuss and made him take her to the bakery on Saturday and buy her half a dozen cupcakes, since she couldn’t have one on her actual birthday. There was a very nice cashier at the bakery who said, “Happy Birthday!” and gave her an extra cupcake when she explained how useless her brother was. 

She took some time to contemplate how to approach phase three of the plan, since phase one and phase two had not been markedly successful. She also contemplated her new vibrator, which was objectively tacky and ridiculous, but was surprisingly interesting when she trailed it along her skin. Vibration felt good! She liked it on her neck, in particular, and on her inner thigh, and when she grew intrigued enough to put it where she knew it was supposed to go, she found that was even better.

That was--a bit distracting from the plan. She spent a few weeks exploring it. 

The vibrator she’d ordered turned out to not be very good quality, and after a few weeks--and what had to really only be a dozen hours of use--it stopped vibrating. That was useless. Laurent threw it out and ordered another one from her brother’s amazon account, a nicer one that she hoped would last longer, and he paid no attention.

For phase three, Laurent started to pay attention to her brother. She tried to observe not just what got him to chauffeur her around--because any day now he was going to realize he could hire someone to do that--but what made him pay attention. To anything, not just to her. What occupied his mind. 

She made some observations. He never said anything about her buying more shampoo, but all the cheap shampoo she bought at the drugstore disappeared somewhere and her shower was stocked with some kind of designer shampoo that came from a salon and smelled like oranges. The same thing happened with hand soap. She put a container of cheap hand soap on the kitchen sink, because Auguste was a hopeless idiot who didn’t have any soap at his kitchen sink, and then that container disappeared and something organic and lightly scented of lavender showed up in its place.

So for phase three, Laurent continued buying things to get Auguste’s attention. But instead of buying things that were expensive--which she’d already concluded didn’t work--she bought things that were in poor taste. 

She again started with small things. She hung a hideous clock in the hallway, smirked when Auguste saw it and made a face, and then counted the hours until he took it down and a different clock appeared, stately and matching the rest of the decor. 

The same thing with kitchen towels. The hot pink ones she ordered disappeared and normal kitchen towels were there. 

This taught Laurent something. Just the fact that Auguste wasn’t talking about these things--didn’t mean he didn’t notice. He clearly did notice what she did, at least when it involved putting something in his apartment. He just preferred to follow her around replacing the tacky things that she bought rather than talk to her about it.

She just had to pick something that both he paid attention to and that he couldn’t just clean up in her wake. 

She tried clothes, first, which was unfortunate because she had to actually wear the hideous outfits she picked out, and Auguste still just went through her stuff later to get rid of the things he didn’t like. She made a mental note that he went through her room, left her vibrator out in the middle of her desk to discourage that, and upped the ante to makeup. She didn’t generally care for makeup, maybe a little if she was dressing up, but she applied especially hideous makeup one day and then went on with their usual tradition of her watching him work out in the home gym room for a bit before he went to shower and she ate breakfast and then he took her to school. 

That worked. Auguste was horrified enough that he stopped lifting and stared at her, and then he tried ignore her like he usually ignored her watching him lift and continue, but he only managed one additional repetition before he set the weights down and turned to her. “Laurent, no,” he said.

Yes, Laurent thought to herself. Finally.

“What?” she said, trying to make her tone innocent.

“You can’t wear makeup like that.”

She pouted. “Uncle let me wear makeup if I wanted to. I’m fifteen.”

“I don’t care if you wear makeup,” Auguste said. “But it should look good.”

He sent her off to the bathroom to wash the hideous makeup off, and she smirked in the mirror while she did so, and then she sensed someone behind her and composed her face and lowered the washcloth and saw him standing in the doorway in the mirror. 

“That’s better,” he said. “You don’t need makeup, really.”

That was actually rather nice of him to say, but she was fishing for attention, not compliments, so she pursed her lips. “I’m fifteen--I want to--”

Auguste rolled his eyes. “Fine.”

He took a step closer to her. 

“Pick one thing to wear today,” he said. 

She held up her mascara. 

“All right,” said Auguste. He pulled out his phone, and searched “how to apply mascara” and made her watch a video with him on how to apply it tastefully. “Do you think you can--” he said, after a couple minutes of watching.

“I don’t know--” she said, just to see if he would--and he did. 

He took the mascara from her, unscrewed the wand and looked at it, took her chin in his other hand to hold her face still, and said, “Close your eyes.”

“The video said to keep them open--”

“Close them,” Auguste said, and she did. She could feel the brush against her eyelashes briefly, first her left eye, and then her right.

She opened her eyes again. Auguste was looking at her closely, inspecting his work. She blinked, showing it off.

“That’s good,” he decided.

“Is it?” she said. His hand was still on her chin. 

“You have nice eyelashes,” he said. “They’re long.”

She blinked at him again, and then he let go of her chin, and stepped back. 

“I have to take a shower,” he said, “go eat breakfast.”

The other good thing about makeup, Laurent realized, was that it could be a daily routine. She picked some type of makeup that she wanted to wear, brought it over to the gym while she watched Auguste finish lifting, and then if it was something new, he watched a video, or if it was something they’d done before, he would simply apply it.

He was fairly good at makeup application. He had steady hands and an eye for detail. She liked their little ritual and it was hard exactly to explain why. She thought about it one time when she was at the psychologist staring at the wall and listening to the woman drone on about building trust in the psychotherapy process. Why did she like Auguste putting on her makeup?

She liked his attention, obviously. She liked that he paid attention to her, and that he cared how she looked, and that he wanted her to look good. She liked the two of them standing close together in the bright lights of the bathroom. He was usually shirtless, from his workout, and she liked the warmth of his chest close to her, brushing her arm. She liked his hands on her face. Which was notable, because if she thought about her uncle’s hands on her face--she didn’t want to think about that.

Auguste seemed willing to fuss in other ways, also. He reparted her hair if the part was crooked. If her shirt collar was reversed he would straighten it. He suggested plucking the hair on her face between her eyebrows, at the top of her nose, and when she agreed, he was willing to fuss over that, too, standing next to her with a tweezer. 

Their mornings together were nice. She liked the time they spent together before he dropped her off at school. Auguste was usually calm and patient, whereas when he came home late from work he was often tired and irritable. 

She sometimes got rides home from friends, and then texted Ancel, Auguste’s assistant, that she didn’t need a ride. Sometimes she had to wait late at the school until Auguste was done with work to pick her up. Sometimes he left work to pick her up and drop her at home, and then went back to work and took clients out to dinner, and didn’t come home until after she was already asleep.

She explored her new vibrator while she was alone. It was more satisfying than the first one, and not just because it didn’t break after a few uses. She found the sensation especially pleasing, somehow. She liked the feeling of arousal growing slowly, in her body, and then cresting gently over the edge.

She felt like she ought to think about something, while she did it. Something sexy, she supposed. 

That seemed complicated. There were other freshman girls who had crushes on people at their school, of course, but none of the boys at school seemed even remotely interesting to Laurent. The freshmen seemed like babies, of course. They were mostly shorter than Laurent and seemed like they were years younger. But even the seniors weren’t interesting to her. They were boring. She didn’t find them interesting to look at and she couldn’t imagine dating one. Thinking about one of them while she used her vibrator seemed laughable.

Maybe she wasn’t interested in men, she thought. Maybe she was a lesbian. That would explain why she hadn’t liked--she didn’t want to think about that. But anyway, maybe she liked women.

She spent a day at school pointedly checking out her female classmates, instead.

It wasn’t really all that much more interesting than checking out the males. She was fascinated by one of her classmate’s chestnut curls, and stared at them through math class, but when she tried to fantasize about the curls later while she was masturbating, imagining touching them, she got distracted wondering why what kind of shampoo her classmate used and ended up on her phone doing a search for shampoo for curly hair.

Maybe she wasn’t into women either, she contemplated.

Maybe she was asexual. There was something--reassuring--about that thought. Something within her liked the idea that she could just get herself off--or not--and she wouldn’t have to worry about other people or what other people thought of her or whether she cared.

She thought about telling her psychologist that she was asexual, mainly to annoy the woman, but she figured it would probably backfire and didn’t.

She knew she was doing things wrong, with her psychologist. Healthy people didn’t stare at the wall during therapy. She should fake being happy. She should talk about trivial things, or give deep consideration to stupid things--like whether being obsessed with the type of shampoo the person in her math class used made her gay--and soon enough her psychologist would pronounce her healed, pat herself on the back for having solved a tough case, and leave Laurent alone. Laurent just couldn’t bring herself to make the effort.

She opened her mind, later, when she was daydreaming, laying on her bed, and she wondered to herself, in a different world, if she would really be asexual. No, she thought. In a different world, where she could pretend things were different and nothing mattered, she imagined herself with a man. 

That was interesting. What type of man, she wondered. She tried to give a face to the figure she pictured beside herself. It was easier to give the man a body. She pictured someone strong. He would be tall--taller than her, even if she wore heels. And big. She wanted someone with broad muscles. Maybe like the guy she had seen that one time at the bakery. Or like her brother! She pictured Auguste’s figure next to her. Yes, that was good. She liked that. She could picture him holding her close to him. Maybe he would be shirtless and wrap an arm around her like the cover of a ridiculous romance novel. 

She liked imagining that. She could picture being pressed against Auguste’s warm chest, and maybe he’d use his hand to tip her chin up like he did when he was putting on her makeup, and then he could lean down a bit, gently, and kiss her--

She realized suddenly she was fantasizing about her brother kissing her, romantically. 

That seemed. Wrong. Had her uncle broken, her, somehow? Was this his fault, that now she thought--

She pushed all of these thoughts aside, and tried to recapture how nice she’d felt about her vision before she had realized what she was thinking. She stuck the friendly baker’s face on her brother’s body and pictured herself pressed up against him again. 

It didn’t work. When his hand tipped her face up to be kissed, it was Auguste again, and she realized she wanted him, not just somebody like him, but him specifically.

She thought about it frequently, once the idea had occurred to her. Auguste held her chin while he put her mascara on, and she thought of her fantasy, again, and her eyes fluttered open, and Auguste stopped and irritatedly told her to close them.

She did, and her fantasy came to her again with her eyes closed, and she leaned a little bit closer to Auguste.

That weekend, Auguste went out. He dressed differently than he did for work, or when he was just sitting at home with Laurent, and he didn’t drive; he caught a ride with a friend. 

Laurent often went to bed when Auguste was still out. If he took clients out to dinner, it often lasted for hours, and she only bothered waiting up if she had homework to finish. 

But she was curious, about him going out, which was new, and so she stayed up watching a movie on the couch, and she fell asleep there anyway, and woke up to the sound of Auguste coming in.

The apartment was dark. She hadn’t turned the lights on when the movie had started, and it had gotten dark, and so the apartment was lit now only by the television and the city through the windows.

Auguste came into the living room, looking at the television. He reached for the remote to turn it off, and it took him a minute.

Laurent moved on the couch. 

“You’re awake,” he said.

“You’re back.”

They stared at each other for a moment, and then she got up and walked past him to go to bed. 

He caught her upper arm as she went by. His grip was hard, and Laurent stopped walking. She was standing close enough to Auguste that she had to look up a little bit to look at him, and she did. 

She could feel his breath heavy on her face; it was thick with alcohol.

“You’re drunk,” she said. 

“Yes,” he agreed. He didn’t let go of her arm.

She waited. She wondered what it was like when he went out. Did he stand next to other people, like this?

Auguste raised his other hand--the one not on her bicep--and touched her face, slowly, with his fingertips. She held her breath. She wanted to lean in, she thought. She wanted--she didn’t know what she wanted.

“You--” Auguste said. His fingertips went along her cheekbone. She was holding her breath again. “You’re so hot,” he said. 

She let her breath out slowly. “Auguste--” she said, not sure where it was going.

But he took his hand away, dropped his grip on her bicep, and stepped back. “Go to bed,” he said, and she did.

She lay in bed and thought about it for a long time. Her thoughts were so buzzy with excitement that she almost didn’t know what to think. She liked it. She liked the way he’d touched her. She liked the way he’d looked at her. She even liked the way he’d grabbed her arm to get her attention. She had wanted--more. She wanted him to look at her like that always, not just for a moment before he looked away. 

And he’d said she was hot. What did that even mean? Maybe it didn’t mean anything, she supposed. He was drunk. She didn’t have much experience with drunk people, but she supposed that drunk people probably said things that didn’t make sense, like really sleepy people, maybe. Although sometimes being really tired or upset let things she hadn’t meant to say slip out, maybe being drunk was like that. Maybe it meant Auguste said things that were true, but that he just hadn’t intended to say.

They didn’t talk about it in the morning. Auguste woke up late and just stared at his coffee mug for a long time. Laurent sat next to him at the kitchen table and finished her homework, and then did some extra credit homework for a class she definitely didn’t need extra credit in just to keep being there. 

Around lunch, Auguste said, “Let’s go to the bakery,” which was novel enough that Laurent raised her eyebrows, and then nodded, and Auguste put his wallet and his keys in his pocket.

“Help me put on mascara, first,” said Laurent, and Auguste agreeably followed her into the bathroom to apply her mascara.

They walked to the bakery a few blocks away. Laurent looked for the nice baker who had given her extra cupcakes, but he wasn’t there.

Laurent felt newly aware of the question of attractiveness. Auguste thought she was hot, but now she felt like she had to evaluate everyone else. She liked how Auguste himself looked. She liked his body--he was strong and he put a lot of work into that--but she also liked his features. They were even and strong. She liked his hair, too. He mostly had it pulled back but sometimes she saw it down and she liked how it fell on his shoulders.

She checked out the other patrons at the bakery while they ate their pastries, and none of them were interesting, and then she checked out the people working at the bakery. One of men working there was kind of muscled, which she noted was good, but she wasn’t interested in him because of something about how he looked at her.

She wasn’t sure she could put it to words, but she paid attention. 

She also tried to pay attention to how to be close to her brother. She noted where he was when they were both in the apartment like there was an invisible cord between them and she was trying to keep the cord as short as possible. She sat next to him on the couch, if he was watching TV, or on the floor next to the couch, leaning against his legs. She sat next to him at the kitchen table. She leaned against him when she had the opportunity, if he was looking for something in the fridge and she wanted to see, next to him, or if he was showing her how to use the washing machine and she had to press close to be able to see all the buttons.

It was becoming close to the end of the year. Laurent signed up for summer school just because she didn’t want to sit around bored at Auguste’s apartment all day. 

Their uncle’s sentencing was completed, and his estate went up for auction, and Laurent was allowed to go there to collect some of her things, with one of the police officers who was apparently supposed to make sure she just took her clothes and stuff and not like, expensive art.

Auguste drove her there on a Saturday. The police officer was in the driveway. Laurent stared at the house.

“I don’t want to go in there,” she said finally.

Auguste offered his hand over the cupholders in the car. She took it and he squeezed her hand comfortingly. “Is there stuff in there that you want?” he said.

There was, kind of. She had stuff in there that reminded her of her mom, and her favorite stuffed dog from when she’d been a little girl. 

She nodded.

Auguste squeezed her hand again. “We can buy new stuff, if you want.”

It was a nice offer. “I kind of want that stuff,” she said.

“Do you want to tell me what you want and I can go get it?”

She thought about that for a moment.

“Laurent,” Auguste said, and she looked over at him. “He’s not in there.”

And she unbuckled her seat belt and got out of the car to go in.

With more of her stuff, she reorganized her closet at Auguste’s apartment, and since it was beginning to be warm, she wore shorts.

She wasn’t honestly trying to get a reaction from her brother by wearing shorts. They weren’t especially cute shorts, just normal shorts, and the weather was warm and merited it. And she had shaved, just...not particularly attentively. But she had never really cared about that kind of thing.

In hindsight, she probably could have predicted that it was a makeup-sort-of-thing, and that Auguste would care, but she didn’t know that when she first did it, and she hadn’t been planning it.

Auguste sat next to her on the couch, and turned on the television, and she rested her feet in his lap, because she liked to try to touch him as much as possible and she was already stretched out over the whole couch. He put his hands on her ankles agreeably, looking at the television and the TV Guide station, but then he moved his hand on her ankles and looked down.

“Laurent,” he said, and his tone was mildly upset so she looked over at him. “You didn’t shave!”

“I did,” she said. 

He ran his hands over her calves, inspecting, and she almost shivered from the sensation. “You missed all kinds of hair!”

That might be true. Laurent shrugged.

Auguste didn’t think that was an acceptable response. He pushed her legs off of his lap. They landed on the floor with a thud. “Go shave!”

“Why?” said Laurent. “I’m not even going anywhere.”

Auguste sputtered. “You can’t just--sit there--with your legs half-shaved.”

Laurent in fact thought it was totally reasonable to sit on the couch at her own house with her legs half-shaved, but she responded to Auguste’s tone, not his logic, and walked off to the bathroom. 

She was half tempted to just put on pants and avoid the whole debate, but she had also kind of liked the feeling of Auguste’s hands running all over her lower legs, so she tied back her hair and started the shower and got out her razor. 

It was awkward to shave her legs in the shower stall. She couldn’t really sit down, so she had to do a combination of leaning over and lifting her leg up, and it wasn’t really an arrangement that led to perfect shaving. 

Whatever, she told herself, it didn’t really matter. 

She had her underwear back on--her bra and panties--when Auguste knocked on the bathroom door. She wrapped herself back up in her towel. “Yes?”

“Did you do it?” he said.

She rolled her eyes at him. “Are you here for an inspection?”

She was joking, but he said, “Yes,” serious, and pushed his way into her tiny bathroom. “Let me see your legs,” he said.

Laurent sputtered. 

Auguste seemed to take in the logistics of the problem. “Sit on the counter,” he told her, patting the edge of it.

She couldn’t hop up on top of the counter while she was still using her hands to hold her towel around herself, so Auguste lifted her up the waist to set her there. She liked that. He lifted her up like she weighed nothing. It wasn’t like when he lifted weights in the gym and sometimes made straining noises when something was really heavy. He set her on the counter like she was a butterfly.

Once up on the counter, she straightened her legs out in front of her and pointed her toes delicately.

“You should have a pedicure,” said Auguste, looking at her feet, but that didn’t seem to be his primary focus, because he put his hands on her left ankle first, and felt along the skin of her leg from the ankle up to her knee. 

“You’re missing spots,” he said.

She snorted. 

He traced along a line of stubble on her leg. “See, here, and here, behind your knee.”

“You’re crazy,” she told him seriously. He moved his hands to her right leg. They were warm against her skin and she liked it. She hissed a little when his hands touched behind her right knee, and he drew his hand away and there was a dot of blood on it.

“You cut yourself,” he said, scolding. “You’re hopeless. You can’t even get rid of all of the hair and you managed to cut yourself.”

“Okay, but,” said Laurent rising to even this ridiculous argument because neither she nor Auguste were the type of people to let a subject go un-argued. “It’s hard to shave in that tiny shower stall! I don’t have enough space. And I think I need a new razor.”

Auguste inspected her flimsy plastic razor, tossed it in the trash, and then lifted her down off the counter again. 

“Come here,” he said, walking down the hall, and she followed him more out of curiosity about how insane he was than anything else.

He led her into the master bathroom, and then he spread out a towel on the floor--there was actually enough floor in his bathroom to do that--and pointed at it. “Sit there.”

“What are you doing,” she said, as he messed around at the sink, and then he turned back to her with a bowl of water, some kind of puff and white powder, and a razor. 

He then proceeded to shave her legs. He had some kind of magical powder that became lather all over her legs, and he covered her right calf first with the foam and then drew the razor--which had fancy wooden handle--over her calf slowly and deliberately. 

Laurent shivered. “Hold still,” Auguste said. 

It was very sensuous, somehow. All the sensations were nice. She liked feeling the lather on her leg, and then she liked the slow drag of the razor, and she especially liked the warm pressure of Auguste’s hands after the razor as he checked that the skin was smooth. She liked Auguste’s quiet attention all focused on her.

He finished with her right calf, and gestured for her to move a little so he could do her left calf. Laurent tried to shift around a bit, but she was sitting on the bathroom floor in her bra and panties with her towel, it was kind of hard to do. Her towel fell awkwardly, revealing her stomach and her panties, and she pulled it back over herself. 

After he finished with her left calf and inspected his work to his satisfaction with his palms, Laurent thought they were done. But he shifted her legs around again, drew her closer to him, ignored that her towel fell and exposed her again, and started applying lather to her right thigh. 

Laurent felt that at least one of them ought to acknowledge how weird this was. Her toes were touching his thigh, which was warm. 

“Auguste,” she said, with a little catch in his name as he spread lather high on her inner thigh and she shivered. “Auguste, you’re shaving my legs.”

He stopped with his razor poised carefully above her knee and looked her in the eyes. “Do you want me to stop?”

“No,” she said. She could feel Auguste’s gaze travel lower, down to where her towel was spilling and showing her bra. She could feel her nipples hard under the fabric and she wondered if he could see that.

Auguste’s gaze lowered further, and he shaved her knee carefully with short strokes, and then her thigh, with longer even strokes. 

After he finished with her left thigh, as well, he rubbed his hands all over her legs, checking them, and then he filled his palm with some kind of lotion, and spread that over her legs as well. 

Laurent shivered, either because it was a nice feeling or because she was still wet and in her underwear.

“I like that,” she said.

Auguste looked sort of startled when she spoke, like he’d somehow been shaving her but pretending she wasn’t there. “It smells good,” he said.

She nodded stupidly. She wanted him to put more lotion on her. Or maybe shave her again, and then lotion her some more. She wondered if she could convince him he missed a spot.

She didn’t try, and it probably wouldn’t have worked, but the nice thing about Auguste apparently being insane about her leg hair was that--it kept growing back. The next Saturday, Auguste took her to some salon where he had apparently made appointments for both of them to get pedicures. He apparently went there regularly, and then after, when they were back home, he was looking at her pink toenail polish and he put a hand on her ankle and he frowned. “You have stubble.”

Laurent took a breath. “So?”

“It’s ruining your pedicure,” he said.

That made--no sense. She was wearing pants, so it wasn’t even like her legs were showing. If he hadn’t put his hand on her ankle under her pants, no one would even know that they had stubble. The stubble hardly even showed, anyway. It was blonde.

“What are you going to do about it?” she asked, feeling a thrill of excitement in her stomach.

He was going to shave her legs again.

She ended up that time in her shirt and her panties sitting in front of Auguste with her back to his chest, in between his legs, and she liked that even better. It was like he was hugging her while he paid careful attention to her legs. He was warm behind her, and his arms brushed hers as he worked. 

He put lotion on her legs again, after he was finished, and she leaned back against him sighing deliciously, and then he pushed her away.

The bathroom floor was tile, so she slid a little bit on the towel he’d spread out, and he scooted away across the floor and pulled a different towel onto his lap.

“What?” she said.

“Nothing,” he said, wiping the extra lotion off his hands on a towel. “You’re done.”

“You’re being weird,” she said.

“Go do your homework,” he said.

“I’m on break,” she said.

He looked confused. 

“Between school and summer school. I don’t have any homework.” She waited, playing with one of her pink toes, and looking at him. “I liked it,” she said.

He looked back at her evenly. “You don’t even know what you’re talking about,” he said.

That evening, he went out.

She wondered if he would come home drunk, again, like he had the previous time he’d gone out, and she stayed up curiously. She wore her pajamas shorts and a tank top and then she was cold. There was some kind of horrible throw on Auguste’s couch that wasn’t warm or soft, so she went to her bedroom and got her pink blanket and brought it out to the couch and wrapped herself up in it. Her legs felt smooth against the fabric. 

She couldn’t tell if he was drunk, when he came home, because he wasn’t alone. There was some woman with him, and they didn’t turn the lights on as they went from the front door to Auguste’s room, so she wasn’t sure they even noticed she was in the living room. 

Laurent sat in the darkness in the living room. She felt absolutely furious. How dare he. This was her home! This was where she lived! He wasn’t supposed to be--fucking some slut--in her house!

The woman left a couple hours later. Laurent was still in the living room, and she’d moved past a fiery anger to a cold fury. 

The woman paused near the door to put on her shoes, and Laurent followed her. She looked up, startled. She had blonde hair. 

“How dare you,” Laurent said.

“Who are you?” the woman said. 

“You slut! You think you can just come in here and fuck--”

“Are you--married?” said the woman.

Auguste came out of his bedroom wearing boxers and nothing else. “What the hell, Laurent?” he said.

The woman turned to him defensively. “I don’t want to be in the middle of anything,” she said. She turned back to Laurent. “He didn’t tell me he was seeing anyone, I wouldn’t have--”

“You would have,” said Laurent. “Because you’re a disgusting slut who--” Auguste wrapped an arm around her head and clapped a hand over her mouth. 

He’d used to do that when she was little, too, and so Laurent knew that he absolutely hated it when she slobbered all over his hand, and she proceeded to do just that. He didn’t let go.

“Just go,” Auguste told the woman, and she went out the door quickly, and then Auguste let Laurent go and wiped his hand off on his boxers. “That’s gross, Laurent.”

“What you did with her is more gross,” said Laurent. 

Auguste gave her a weird look. “We hooked up,” he said. “We were fucking.”

“Then you can deal with a little spit on your hand.”

“You can’t just insult my guests in the middle of the night,” said Auguste. 

“You can’t really stop me,” Laurent said. 

Auguste looked like he wanted to tell her that he could stop her, somehow, but he couldn’t think of exactly how he was going to do that. 

Suddenly, his annoyance turned to a stricken expression. “Is this because of--”

She could see where he was going and he was so completely wrong, “No!”

“--what happened to you?” he said awkwardly.

“This has nothing to do with that!”

“I can see that,” Auguste looked pained, “that would give you some negative--feelings--about sex--”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” she screeched.

“Adults having sex can be nice!” Auguste said, as Laurent turned down the hall.

And she said, “You don’t understand anything! You don’t know anything!” and then she slammed her bedroom door in his face.

The next day, she refused to come out of her room. She snuck out to the bathroom before Auguste woke up, and then she stayed inside when she heard him waking up and going to the kitchen.

He tried to pretend for a while that he didn’t care what she did, but then he came and knocked on her door and said, “Laurent, do you want breakfast?”

That was laughable. Auguste never offered her breakfast even if she came out of her room. He’d probably set the building on fire trying to put a waffle in the toaster. “No,” she said.

She heard his footsteps go down the hall.

She got distracted for a while on her computer. He came back again and knocked on her door a second time. “Laurent, I’m going to the gym.”

That wasn’t a question so she didn’t say anything. 

“Are you dead?” said Auguste, sounding exasperated.

“No,” she said back and then she heard his footsteps down the hall again, and she heard the front door open and close. 

That meant she could poke her head out the door, make sure he was really gone, and then sneak off to the kitchen to eat something. She thought about cleaning her dishes and putting them away so he wouldn’t know she’d come out, and then she thought about leaving her dirty dishes ostentatiously in the middle of the counter because he hated that. 

She was still pouting and basically giving him the silent treatment when he drove her to her psychologist appointment on Tuesday. 

Her psychologist continued to seem content to talk at Laurent despite Laurent’s refusal to respond, and she kept saying, “Think about what you want, Laurent,” and so Laurent did, just to spite her.

She wanted--what did she want. She wanted her parents back. Well, that was easy enough, she supposed, but that wasn’t going to happen. What did she want that she could actually have? 

She kept thinking about it when she was back at home. Auguste had to go out, dinner with a client, and once she was alone in the apartment she went into Auguste's bedroom.

It was clearly an invasion of his privacy, but he also clearly invaded her privacy and went through her things, so she didn’t especially care. 

His room sort of smelled like him. She could smell his aftershave, in the bathroom, and in his bedroom his closet smelled like wool and cedar, and his bed just smelled like him. She lay down in the center of it and spread her arms and legs like a giant starfish. 

She thought more about what she wanted. She wanted Auguste. She wanted Auguste’s attention. She was happiest when they were together and when he was paying attention to her. She wanted him to be spending time with her, not some stupid slut he met at a bar. 

She imagined what must have happened, when he and the woman were in his bedroom. They had been kissing and pressed together when they came through the door, she had seen that from the hall. They might have kissed more. They might have collapsed onto the bed and kissed on the bed where she was. 

What then? Laurent supposed they would take their clothes off. Unless Auguste just wanted the woman to suck him, and had only bothered to open his pants. Laurent didn’t like that thought at all, but she forced herself to acknowledge for a moment that it was possible.

No, she told herself. Auguste had said they were fucking. She didn’t think he would have said that if he had just gotten a blowjob. Also, when he’d come out of his room, after, he’d just been wearing his boxers, which she thought meant that he had been naked when the woman had first left, and had pulled them on when he heard the fuss in the hall. 

So they would take their clothes off. Laurent could fairly easily picture her brother naked. She had seen him in just his boxers, and she just imagined that the boxers were--not there--with a bit of haziness in her head as to what was there. It was harder to imagine what the woman looked like naked--Laurent had only seen her for a few minutes, and in the dark. But she wasn’t sure she especially cared about that part. She took her clothes off, instead, shimmying out of her jeans and pulling her t-shirt over her head and dropping it on the side of the bed. 

She lay there for a moment in just her bra and panties, and then she took those off, too, and let them drop on top of the stack of her jeans and t-shirt. She pulled up his sheet over her head, surrounding herself in Auguste’s scent. 

She thought about what would come next. She touched her own breast until her nipple became pointed and pebbled from the sensation, and then she did the other one. She pushed her hand lower, across her stomach, staring at sheet and the vague impression of the ceiling lamp through it, and she shivered a little bit, and then she pushed her hand even lower, and touched herself. 

She wanted Auguste--like that, that she realized. She wanted it to be Auguste’s hand on her now rather than her own. She liked touching herself in his bed surrounded by his scent. And he wouldn’t just touch her a little bit, she thought, wishing she’d brought one of her toys from her own room with her on this exploration. She slid one of her fingers inside herself, feeling. Auguste would do that, she thought, shivering, and then he might be on top of her, and he-- 

“Laurent?”

She poked her head out from under the sheet and he was there, standing in the doorway, staring at the bed.

“What the hell are you doing?” he said.

Laurent pursed her lips. “I was thinking about you,” she said.

“Why are you in my bed?” he seemed frozen in the doorway. 

Laurent sat up, and the sheet feel down to her waist. Auguste’s face was shocked, and then he put his hands up to cover his eyes, and then he turned around. “You’re naked!”

That was so obvious it didn’t seem to merit a response.

He didn’t wait for one, either. “Get up!” he said. “Put your clothes back on!”

“I don’t want to,” she said.

He was flabbergasted enough that he turned around toward her, then seemed to remember that she was naked, and turned around again. “I don’t care what you want!” he said. “Stop being naked!”

“I don’t want a lot of things,” said Laurent, thoughtfully. “But I want you,” she said.

Auguste peeked a glance at her. “You’re still naked.”

“You’re not listening to me,” said Laurent. “Come be naked with me.”

Auguste looked stunned. He was apparently overcome enough now to turn around and argue with her face-to-face. “You don't even know what you’re talking about,” he said.

“I do,” said Laurent.

“You’re--broken,” he sputtered. 

She frowned.

“You just think that you want me because our uncle--twisted you,” said Auguste.

“Don’t talk about him!” said Laurent, starting to feel angry again herself. 

Auguste was still ranting. “He ruined you, and now, now it’s your fault that I have all of these feelings! You’ve twisted me, too, and--”

“Feelings?” Laurent interrupted.

Auguste seemed to realize what he’d said and his face showed his regret.

“I don’t have any feelings,” said Auguste.

“You yell a lot for someone with no feelings,” said Laurent mildly.

“I’m taking you back to the psychologist,” said Auguste. 

“Right now?” said Laurent. “But I’m naked.” She stretched, showing off. “The psychologist likes talking about feelings,” said Laurent. “Tell me more about yours.”

“I hate you,” said Auguste, leaving the doorway. She followed him down the hall still naked and feeling powerful since he seemed to be struggling to look at her. He shut himself in the workout room, and he had to be leaning against the door because it didn’t lock and yet she couldn’t budge it open.

She waited a couple of minutes and then decided she was bored, and went back to her own room where she’d left her toys. 

When she woke up in the morning, the clothes she’d left in his room were clean and in a folded stack in front of her door, and she put them in her closet with a feeling of triumph.

She went into the gym the next morning--it was open--for her usual habit of watching him lift for a while before she ate breakfast. He eyed her warily but didn’t say anything.

After a while, he said, “I could show you how to lift?”

She would have taken him up on that, a month prior, because it would have seemed like a good way to spend time with him, and maybe him spotting her at lifting would have resulted in some friendly touching. But she better understood her options, now, so she said, “I prefer watching.” Auguste swallowed hard, and she suppressed a smile. 

Laurent was, actually, despite what her brother thought, capable of shaving her own legs.

She didn’t, though. She deliberately stopped shaving and deliberately wore shorts every day and waited for Auguste to go insane.

It took less than a week. He tried to tell her to go shave, at first, but she cocked her head at him and widened her eyes and said, “I might cut myself!” and he didn’t even argue very much. They ended up back to front again, which was becoming her favorite position. She relaxed back against his chest and moved her leg as directed for his worth with the lather and the razor. After he finished shaving her and then applying the lotion, per their ritual, his hands stayed warm on her thighs.

She just breathed, for a moment, enjoying his warmth behind her and trying to tell if he had an erection against her back.

Then, she took his right hand off her right thigh—he was right handed, after all—and moved it to her center, resting it on top of her panties.

He said, “Laurent, no,” but he didn’t move his hand from where she’d placed. She rested her own hand on top of it.

“Yes,” she said. “I can tell you want to.”

She could feel his breath against her neck. “I’ll be as bad as he is,” he said.

She rubbed the side of her face against his, slightly, nuzzling. He had a tiny bit of stubble on his cheek, how did he stand that? But she kind of liked the feel of it. “No,” she said. “I want you to.”

“Maybe you said that to him,” he said.

“I didn’t.”

There was a long moment of quiet. His hand moved slightly, touching her, and she arched a little back against him. He took his hand away, but didn’t push her away.

“Laurent, I can’t,” he said, his voice breaking.

“But you want to,” she said.

He nodded.

“It’s okay if you don’t, for now,” she decided, “as long as you want to.”

Auguste bought a whole stack of books, Laurent saw, about parenting teenagers. She rolled her eyes and then decided to investigate a bit further, and checked out the chapter he had bookmarked in the top book, which was about talking to your teenager about sex.

Laurent rolled her eyes again, and read further. Auguste seemed to in particular be marking the page of a callout box on teens with troubled expressions of sexuality, whatever that meant, and Laurent lost patience. She took out a red marker, and wrote on the page, “JUST FUCK ME” in large letters over the text, and then put the bookmark back in and left the book for Auguste to find.

The books disappeared shortly after.

Auguste went through phases where he was affectionate and tempted and then phases where he was angry and withdrawn. Laurent waited him out. He wasn’t really mad at her, she told herself, he was mad himself and taking it out on her, which was rude of him, but she could wait him out. 

They spent an affectionate Saturday together, going to the store and then making lunch at the apartment, and then in the afternoon Auguste got squirrely and weird and started messaging someone on his phone.

Laurent sat next to him. “What are you doing?”

He looked over at her. “Making plans to go out.”

“What are you going to do, out?” she said.

“I’m going to get a drink with my friend.”

“Who’s your friend?”

“Someone from my gym,” he said. 

“Why do you want to go out?”

He looked at her seriously. “Sometimes it’s fun to--meet people.”

She rolled her eyes. “You mean fuck people.”

He persisted. “You should meet someone,” he told her. 

He undoubtedly intended that she meet someone at her school, or something, but then that was the day she met Damen. 

Auguste was doing something to his hair when the door buzzed, so he shouted, “Laurent, get the door.” 

Her meeting Damen was all his fault, really. The main thing Auguste had told Laurent about answering the door in their apartment was not to let axe murderers in. So Laurent buzzed down to the lobby and said, “Are you an axe murderer?”

A warm voice laughed. “No, I’m trying to find Auguste?”

Laurent pressed the button to open the main door. Then, a few minutes later, the not-an-axe-murderer knocked on their unit door. 

Laurent opened it. 

She looked over Auguste’s friend and she liked what she saw. He was big--she supposed it made sense that they were friends from the gym--tall, with broad shoulders and thick arms. He had brown curly hair. He was smiling and his smile was kind.

“You must be Auguste’s sister,” he said. He stuck out his hand and after a considering moment she put her own hand out and let him shake it.

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m an axe murderer. I just wanted to make sure you weren’t competition.”

He laughed. “Have you axed Auguste, then, or is he having some kind of hair crisis?”

“I axed him,” she said. “Do you want to be next?” She gestured for him to come in. 

He seemed to think she was hilarious, and laughed again, and said, “Sure,” and came into their apartment. 

He sat down on the couch, to wait for Auguste, and she perched on the arm of the couch and looked at him, because he was nice to look at.

He smiled at her. “Auguste told me about you,” he said. “He’s super proud of his little sister.”

“He should be,” she said. “I’m amazing.”

“I’m Damen,” he offered. “Auguste and I go to the same gym.”

She nodded seriously. “And are you going to the gym tonight?”

Damen leaned in toward her. “I don’t think so.”

“Get in a good workout,” she said, lowering her voice.

Damen’s breath caught. It was working. “Maybe some dancing,” he said. 

“Get sweaty,” Laurent said, making it sound dirty. 

That was when Auguste finally came out of the bathroom. Both of them looked over at him, and he looked at the two of them, Damen on the seat of the couch and Laurent on the arm, both of them leaning in toward each other, smiling. Auguste frowned. “I’m ready.”

“Great,” Damen said, standing up. Damen made his way toward the door. Auguste was still frowning at Laurent. 

“Come back soon, Damen,” said Laurent. “Maybe I’ll tell you my axe murdering secrets.” 

Damen laughed again, and promised that he would, and Auguste shut the door between her and Damen’s laughter, still frowning at her. 

Laurent laughed, feeling gleeful, and texted her brother. “I like him. You can have him as a friend.” 

Auguste didn’t reply.

Alone, Laurent amused herself with her favorite vibrator, thinking about someone who wasn’t her brother. She pictured Damen’s hands, touching her--his hands had been so big--and she liked that mental picture. After she came once, she started second-guessing herself. Axe murderer? That wasn’t even that funny. Couldn’t she have thought of something better? She tried to plan good things to say to Damen next time she saw him. 

She napped for a while, and then she got herself off again, and then she dozed again until she heard the door to the apartment opening. 

She wandered out into the hall in her panties and a thin t-shirt with no bra, half hoping that Damen had come back with Auguste, too. 

It was just her brother, taking his shoes off and dropping his wallet and keys into the bowl. 

He glanced her direction, took in her state of undress, let his gaze linger a moment, and then looked back at where he was trying to toe off his shoe. He’d pretty much given up trying to make her wear more clothes. 

“Hi,” said Laurent. “You’re back. Did you meet someone?”

He didn’t say anything, just eyed her.

“What was her name?” said Laurent. 

Auguste started down the hall toward his room. Laurent followed close behind him. “I don’t know,” he said.

“Good,” said Laurent. “Did Damen meet someone?”

Auguste eyed her again. He was in his room, near the bathroom door. He started taking off his belt. 

Laurent leaned against his dresser and watched. He pulled his belt out of the loops and hung it on a rack in his closet, and then he tugged his socks off his feet and threw them in his hamper, and then he started unbuttoning his shirt.

“Damen and I fucked the same woman,” he told her, before he shrugged his shirt off his shoulders.

Laurent’s eyes widened. 

“At the same time,” Auguste said, still staring at her. 

“How does--” said Laurent, trying to imagine it. She licked her lips. 

Auguste broke their gaze and dropped his shirt into the hamper also and started undoing the button and the zipper on his pants. When his pants were open, he caught her gaze again, and then he held it while he took his pants off. She watched. 

“Did she--” said Laurent “--look like me?”

“No,” said Auguste. It was an extremely unconvincing no. Laurent smiled smugly. 

Auguste stripped off his underwear, also--Laurent watched closely--and turned toward the bathroom.

He stepped into the shower. Laurent took off her t-shirt and underwear, much more quickly than Auguste had undressed, and stepped into his shower behind him. It was huge; there was plenty of space.

He seemed surprised. “What are you doing?”

“What are you doing?” she said.

“Taking a shower!”

“I’m taking a shower too,” she said.

“This is not appropriate, Laurent,” he said.

It hadn’t been appropriate for him to strip while she was watching and tell her about him and Damen fucking some woman, either. He just wanted a reason to believe this was okay.

“It’s fine,” she told him. “We’re not even touching.”

Auguste seemed to accept that argument, and started the water. He soaped himself quickly--she watched--and then Laurent said, “Wash my hair.”

Auguste didn’t say anything, but he put some shampoo into his palm, and then Laurent stepped closer to him and turned around so he could have access to her head. 

It was amazing. His fingers were strong, and he massaged her scalp firmly. She hummed, pleased. It was like shimmers of pleasure were going down her spine. 

He moved so she could rinse, after, and then he filled his palm with conditioner, and spread it gently through the length of her hair. 

“You should wash my hair, now,” he said.

“You’re too tall,” Laurent made a face.

He laughed a little, seemingly giving up, but then Laurent had an idea, and put some shampoo in her hand. “Lift me up,” she said.

His eyes widened. She thought for a long moment that he was going to say no, either because they had clearly passed some sort of line for the amount of naked touching that Auguste could justify to himself, or because he was afraid that they were going to slip on the wet tile and die, but then he picked her up. 

She was resting on his hip, and she wrapped her legs around his waist. Her back was pressed lightly against the shower tile wall for balance, and then she reached up to wash his hair. Her fingers weren’t as big as his, but she tried to massage his scalp anyway. He closed his eyes, enjoying the sensation. 

She could feel his cock against her thigh. 

She rinsed his hair with the showerhead, and then leaned in and tilted her forehead against his. “Are you hard?” she said.

That was the line, apparently. He set her down, and he turned around so she couldn’t see his cock--which she was fairly confident was hard. “Get out,” he said.

“I haven’t even conditioned your hair,” she objected.

“Go, Laurent,” he said, and she laughed, and stepped out of the shower and used his towel to dry off. 

She didn’t go far. She dried off a little and then lay down on his bed, wrapped in a towel to wait. 

He came out with another towel safely wrapped around his waist, and a comb, and started to work on his hair, which was a mess.

“Here,” she said, reaching for it, and she knelt behind him on the bed and patiently combed out his hair. She had long hair herself, so she knew how to do it. She started by working out the snarls at the bottom, holding the hair above that to prevent tugging on his head, and then she worked slowly upward. 

When she had finished, she handed him back the comb. 

She lost her towel, in the movement, and it fell to the bed. “Do me,” she said, turning so he could comb her hair. 

Her hair was easier to work with--because it had been properly conditioned--but he displayed the same careful patience she had, and he didn’t object to the fact that she had lost her towel. 

He got another towel, after, to gently dry each of their hair a bit, and when she tossed her wet towel on the floor he got a grumpy expression and picked it up and took it back into the bathroom.

He came out of the bathroom naked--she looked at him--and he took a pair of boxers out of a drawer in his closet and pulled them on. 

She was still sitting on one side of his bed when he came back and climbed into the other side, under the sheet and blanket. 

She had been sort of waiting to be kicked out, but if he wasn’t going to--she climbed under the sheet and blanket on the other side. He flipped a switch next to his side of the bed, and the room was dark.

“Auguste,” she said, after a moment. She whispered, because it was dark.

“What?” he whispered back.

“What was it like, fucking the woman?”

He sighed. “It was good.”

“What’s it like, fucking?”

Auguste seemed to consider the question. “Sticky,” he said.

Laurent made a face. 

She scooted closer to his side of the bed--the bed was so large it would probably hold three people who weren’t even touching--and reached out until she found his arm and rested her hand on it.

“Auguste, I liked your friend,” she said.

“I noticed,” he said.

“Do you think he liked me?” 

“Damen likes everyone,” said Auguste. Then, sounding exasperated, he said pointedly, “Except people who talk all night and don’t let him sleep. Go to sleep, Laurent.”

“Damen isn’t here,” she said.

“You are,” he retorted nonsensically.

“That’s right, I am,” she said smugly. 

“I’m finding it hard to get rid of you,” he said, but his voice was kind, and she fell asleep with a smile on her face.


End file.
